Last Wednesday was London wiki wednesday again. We struggled a bit with organisation this time. The usual to’ing-and-fro’ing around finding sponsors and hosts was confounded by a problem with the website. SocialText foolishly switched it to be hidden from… well the web… which really doesn’t help when you’re trying to promote an event. Despite these difficulties, enough people came together at NYK to make for a decent gathering, with some interesting presentations. Actually the low attendance makes for some nice face-to-face group discussions.

For me the highlight was chatting with Paul Downey. I’ve run into him once or twice before, and was familiar with tiddlywiki, which he presented again. This is a somewhat wacky animated javascripty tool which is quite different in it’s interface and behaviour compared to “normal” wikis. Surely the work of an evil genius…

But it turns out Paul Downey is also responsible for this remarkable creation:

see it bigger to read the funny labels. Also with annotations on flickr.

A fascinating cartoony metaphorically abstracted representation of web technologies. I came across this a couple of years ago, while I was still an integration consultant, and I found the “SOA tower of babel” particularly amusing (and accurate)